*These are extracts from my MSc Dissertation ‘Rebel Governance amid Civil War: A Black Flag in Raqqa’ writen last summer at SOAS when ISIS invaded Mosul and declared the Caliphate. Today, one year later, it is worth remembering that the beast keeps on eating and slaughtering. Same system of governance, more brutality, less borders. More deads, less hope*

The Nature of the Beast

On April 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who became emir of the ISI after the death of Abu Omar in April 2010, declared that the Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) (until then the major jihadi group fighting in Syria) was simply the Syrian offshoot of the ISI. In his statement, al-Baghdadi announced that both groups would merge creating the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

Nonetheless, JN’s leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani rejected such proposition and sought to preserve its affiliation with al-Qaeda with a renewal of allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri (Caillet 2013). The latter called for the separation between the two groups and their commitment to different ‘spatial states’ (Atassi 2013), but it was followed by an audio message in which Baghdadi strongly rejected Zawahiri’s order. Similarly, ISIS’ spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani accused Jolani of ‘defection’ and affirmed that ISIS would reject any territorial divisions based on ‘Sykes-Picot’ (al-Tamimi 2014b).

By the time Baghdadi announced the formation of an Islamic Caliphate and rebranded ISIS as the Islamic State, his organisation had already developed systems of governance for seven months, broken the border with Iraq, and dominated vast areas of the latter including Mosul, its second largest city. In fact, IS-dominated territory now stretches from western Baghdad until the ruins of Aleppo, erasing the colonial ‘Sykes-Picot’ border and creating a strategically crucial area by fusing eastern Syria (Raqqa and Der-Ezzor) with their strongholds in Iraq (Looney 2013).

The explanations for such success are various. Firslty, it is worth remembering that the presence of mujahideen along the border is by no means novel. During 2006 and 2007, the Syrian authorities permitted the entrance of many jihadists across the country’s borders and even through the Damascus Airport in order to actively support the Iraqi insurgency. It thus seems that Assad was well aware of such reality and ‘allowed jihadists to establish a foothold along the Syrian-Iraqi border’ (Kenner 2013). According to al-Qaeda files found in 2007 in the Iraqi border town of Sinjar, more than 600 foreign fighters had entered Iraq from Syria (Abouzeid 2014).

Secondly, from a pure military angle, al-Dawla has taken advantage of rebel infighting and the uncertainty of their supporters, which has been steady throughout the conflict. Moreover, the disintegration of various rebel groups was precipitated by the fact that many of their members either sympathised with the IS’s ideas or refused to attack any group other than the regime (Hassan 2014).

Thirdly, the IS has become an incredibly well funded organisation. As Davidson (2014) suggests, al-Dawla’s funds come from ‘regionally based, as well as international sympathisers’, but especially from the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq. Moreover, the IS has seized the strategic oil and gas fields of Eastern Syria, namely in Raqqa and Der-Ezzor. They normally sell crude to middlemen or distributes it to Iraq through the contiguous province of Ninewa, but there are reports that suggests that they have even resell it to the Syrian government (Hubbard et al 2014). The IS has also profited from smuggling of raw materials, looted priceless antiquities, and seized all kinds of spoils of war (Chulov 2014). Such a considerable economic power has allowed the organisation to increase their military capabilities and remain almost untouched in Raqqa.

Fourthly, as Legrand (2014, p.7) argues, the complex ethnic, tribal, and class divisions of Syria’s northeast allows the IS to ‘build rapid, albeit provisional, alliances by surfing on local tensions’. As the French and the Assad regime did before, al-Dawla is exploiting tribal rivalries over economic resources in the al-Jazira region.

Hence, tribal authorities try to fill the vacuum left by the Syrian regime through pledging allegiance to the IS, sometimes without inquiring into their ideology. The Afadila tribe of Raqqa, formerly affiliated with the Syrian regime, pledged allegiance to the IS (Caillet 2013); Sheikh Nawaf al-Bashir, leader of the Bagara tribe and former politician, has also recently pledged allegiance to al-Dawla, obtaining two oil wells in exchange for their support and safe access on the Raqqa-Der-Ezzor road (Legrand 2014, p.7).

And finally, the emergence of al-Dawla should be seen, as Hassan (2014) highlights, in the context of a ‘Sunni sense of alienation, from Lebanon to Yemen and from Egypt to Iran’. Shi’ites and other minorities, thus, have become more decisive in political and social affairs, shrinking the relevance of traditional Sunni powerhouses. This, combined with the politicisation of traditional Salafism since the onset of the Arab uprisings, has given the IS an incredible appeal.

A Holistic System of Governance

Al-Dawla is thus using the most brutal violence to reconfigure social structures and the conditions ‘within which wartime social interaction occurs’ (Lubkeman 2008, p.14). Through violence, al-Dawla aims to shape the everyday experience of those who live under its control: a pervasive strategy that seeks to foster a new existence and a new social condition.

Although brutal and seemingly irrational, al-Dawla’stargeting logic has been following certain paths. Firstly, it has been killing regime fighters, collaborators and members of other armed groups. Al-Dawla has been crucifying and beheading its enemies on a weekly basis, always in a public space and meticulously reported through social media. Crucifixion and beheading are not only highly spectacular and performative, but also resonate strongly within some elements of the Islamic community as they symbolize the merciless war against unbelief, allegedly al-Dawla’sraison d’être.

And secondly, it has been targeting ‘misbehaving individuals, from petty thieves to those disrespecting its authority’ (Kalyvas 2014). The IS systematically applies hudud punishments for an assortment of crimes such as blasphemy, disobedience, or theft.

Religious socialisation is capital after the IS has secured dominance of a particular territory. The word da’wa is ‘used in Islamic discourse to refer to missionary outreach’ (Al-Tamimi 2014b) and has become a cornerstone in the IS efforts to consolidate its authority. Da’wa events are thus opportunities for al-Dawla to spread its worldview, strengthen its political power, and ‘build-up ties to Muslim locals’ (Ibid). Religious education is also part of the IS broader strategy to consolidate its soft-power a particular religious political culture in Raqqa. For instance, it has organised Qur’anic training sessions for new imams in order to correct people’s understanding of religion and clarify the truth (Islamic State Report nº1 2014, p.1).

A further element of al-Dawla’s strategy to build legitimacy is its religious police, or al-Hisba.This police force has the mandate to promote virtue and prevent vice and, in fact, it resembles al-Mutawa, the Saudi morality police, often criticised for its harsh practices (Rossomando 2014). Thus, the wide presence of al-Hisba patrol vehicles in Raqqa confirms that al-Dawla is deeply concerned about consolidating its religious legitimacy. Instead of creating one police force that would deal with both civil affairs and religious observances, the IS has decided to invest an important amount of resources in developing a specialised police force only to enforce Shari’a.

Nonetheless, al-Dawla is more concerned in fostering a new generation socialised under its ideological worldview.

By sustaining and promoting a particular Islamic ideology that penetrates every single dimension of the political, social and personal realm, al-Dawla is trying to build hegemony and a distinct system of socialisation that is diametrically opposed to Baathist secularism in ideas, but hugely similar in practices and intentions.

The Islamic State is also highly committed in providing services and goods to the population, especially to the poor and the underprivileged in a clear attempt to establish itself as a ‘soft-hearted’ power and ensure support. Clearly, the IS has put a lot of effort in creating a network of services wide enough to meet daily necessities and ensure that the city becomes dependent on it in the long run. Symbolic or not, such efforts demonstrate that al-Dawla acknowledges the importance of generating a feeling of empowerment among Sunnis in Raqqa that would eventually make its rule even sturdier in the long run.

Socialisation under the Islamic State: Is there any way back?

In a brief period of time, it has created a holistic system of governance that has the ability to coerce and socialise, break territorial borders, and obtain local support by drawing on Islamic points of reference antagonistic to the hitherto dominant secularism. A novel socio-political order, thus, that is both a product of contemporary warfare and a manifestation of a distinct social space and its long-lasting alienation.

The Islamic State might be soon eradicated by international powers. Its expansionist logic poses, some might argue, a severe challenge to the existing regional and worldwide order. Nonetheless, its mere existence may not be just worrying, but also illuminating. It is the child of colonisation, of decades of repression and isolation and war. Arisen out of existing sociological and political circumstances, but forging a distinct order with brand new coordinates. To understand why the Islamic State exists and how it performs is the best way to combat it.

Language cannot describe it. Fear is the internal sensation when you physically feel your heart between your feet and not in your chest; fear is the look on people’s faces, and their darting eyes when the time for the torture sessions comes near.

When death is a daily occurrence, lurking in torture, random beatings, eye-gouging, broken limbs and crushed fingers… [When] death stares you in the face and is only avoided by sheer chance…wouldn’t you welcome the merciful release of a bullet?

Warfare and its mediation run in parallel ways. Outside the battlefield, the events are constantly narrated and reported through a whole range of media platforms that automatically create spectators all over the world. Thus, ‘as far as news of war goes, the media are becoming a second-order paramount reality’ (Silverstone 2007, p.110), hence substituting the tangible face-to-face world. However, this particular space created through the mediation of war is far from being a mere innocuous representation. As Hoskins & O’Loughlin (2010, p.64) suggest, news media blur the war on the ground while delivering it because only the war events that media bring us are interpreted meaningfully. Regarding warfare, media become powerful not because they hold power or agency but because constitute ‘by and large the space where power is decided’ (Castells 2007, p.242). Consequently, new social media – by their particular characteristics – shape differently 1) how war is being constructed; 2) the way the conflict is perceived and 3) the effects that mediation of war have into the conflict’s struggle over power.

The specificity and constrains that characterise the mediation of the current Syrian conflict lie at the core of the above discussion. Amid the lack of an extensive presence of mainstream media platforms on the ground, citizen journalism and social media have become the key pillars of the way the Syrian war is being reported. The day-to-day events of the Syrian war are reported extensively and immediately through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. This sense of ‘liveness’, together with the multiplicity of actors reporting and the structure of these platforms, highly affect the way the war is constructed and perceived. Moreover, media have become an attached battlefield to the war itself in which different actors involved in the Syrian war struggle to obtain more legitimacy, foster their own discourse and truth and even try to reshape the parameters in which the war is being conducted.

Source: tulaneict4d.wordpress.com

Without any doubt, the proliferation of non-journalist accounts of war and the increasing use of amateur photography and video resources have meant an important cultural shift. As Mathesson & Allan (2009, p.106) highlight, ‘the perspective of an individual speaking outside the frameworks provided by society’s dominant institutions’ has to be acknowledged. Thus, amateur chronicling relying heavily on social media has changed the traditional rules and behaviours of war reporting because its lack of restrictions and hierarchy, and cheapness (Dror in Karam 2013). In Syria, many social networks function as participatory news agencies: each member publishes information regarding an event while other users can prove or disapprove by providing additional facts (Lucas 2012).

The role of images took in Syria and propagated worldwide through social media platforms have been key in this ‘media battle’ that follows the actual struggle in the country. Images are used in order to make evident the ‘truth of war’ (Matheson & Allan 2009, p.147) and, hence, images proliferate as much as different voices configure the battlefield. The generation of a ‘truth of war’ is far from being monolithic; images construct a certain truth of the events but, by definition, cannot provide an ‘accurate representation of war’ (Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2010, p.4).

Source: nicholsoncartoons.com.au

The question of bias is crucial when analysing any sort of textual or visual informative piece that comes from Syria. Thus, the elaboration of videos, capture of photos or news reporting that flow in the social media have to contextualized within the power and territorial struggle in Syria, one that is progressively defining almost exclusive domination zones for every contender. The spread of this material by hundreds of citizen-journalists does not mean that the conflict is properly covered (Vogt 2013); in fact, disinformation and propaganda are thriving because of the small presence of independent observers on the ground.

Moreover, videos, while can provide us a highly relevant glimpse into war events, are also a ‘potentially warped vision’ of it (Karam 2013) and sometimes simply hoaxes. Verification is an essential cornerstone for those organisations and users that seek to disseminate them responsibly across the web, but also is of capital importance when audiences analyse the content of these videos.

The vast amount of information –visual and textual- that flows within the social media network can become nothing more than a new ‘fog of war’ (Varghese 2013, p.2) that turns a rich information environment into a fully distortioned one. The ‘distortion of evidences and the suppression of contradictory facts’ (Naureckas 2013) reveal the ‘darker side’ of the Syrian war’s social media covering. A war reporting that is not only characterised by bias in the selection of the information provided but also by ‘security concerns for those transmitting the information’ (Curtis 2013). Thus, the fear of one’s identity being discover while using internet in Syria arises as a major obstacle that conditions what sort of information is provided and silences many others. Propaganda and self-censorship (Bogart 2013) clearly affect the quality and relevance of the information delivered.

Source: takefiveblog.org

By the same token, bandwagoning is a process that can easily structure our own understanding of the war; social media amplifies and multiplies so extensively certain content (mainly in Twitter where the option Retweet is largely used) that creates an uneven picture of the events that powerfully appeals to the less informed users.

Thus, in a scenario in which credibility has replaced truth as the main principle regarding the scrutiny of information, legitimacy is of paramount relevance. The attribution of legitimacy to representations of war within the social media ecology becomes more complex because of a) the proliferation of image-weapon tactics (Michalski & Gow 2007, p.212) that hold huge performative power – following a constructivist approach -, and b) the speed with which this various claims circulate within the web (Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2010, p.167).

Those who wish to follow and comprehend the dynamics of the Syrian war stand in front of a ‘Big Brother Battlefield’ (Michalski & Gow 2007, p.221), in which the battle consists in winning ‘hearts, minds and retinas’ (Ibid, p.201) of those ‘witnessing’ the events. Despite the vast amount of information available in real time, the recreation of the war within the social media scenario allow the proliferation of biased information, lack of deep analysis and pose considerable difficulties to adscription of legitimacy and credibility to any of the reports that come from inside Syria amid the thick fog of war. And sometimes, liveness, by being overused, happens to be misguiding.

Here, [in Syria] holding a pen is as dangerous as holding a gun (El Amin in Lucas 2012)

The study of civil war and rebellion has been characterised for many decades by the extraordinary amount of scholarly material produced by mainstream political scientists. Despite the arguably lack of nuance, many political scientists have abused from quantitative and statistic tools that kept their studies excessively concerned with causation and variation. Until recently, as Arjona (2011, p.1) suggests, the literature on civil war has tended to approach macro-level phenomena such as conflict onset (Collier and Hoeffler 2004), duration or termination (Fearon 2004). And even the growing scholarly work on micro-level dynamics of conflict has mainly analysed the patterns of combatant recruitment (Humphreys and Weinstein 2008) or variation among rebels’ military tactics (Fearon and Laitin 2003).

In this regard, Kalyvas’ seminal work The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006) is worth considering. In it, Kalyvas develops a comprehensive review of literature on civil war, theorises through a ‘rational choice model’ in which instances violence is exerted during a civil conflict and presents novel data on the Greek insurgency during the Second World War. Despite its enormous relevance and influence, the theorisation of war and violence as a ‘rational strategy of authority’ does not enhance our knowledge of ‘the forms of social transformation during conflict’ (Bakonyi and Stuvøy 2005, p.363). As Malesevic (2010, p.75) suggests, social action in wartime is always ‘richer, more complex and messier’ than the Kalyvas formula suggests: rebels’ decisions are not always articulated through strategic rational choices, but also through symbolic (Malthaner 2011) or ideological (Malesevic 2006) frameworks.

However, Kalyvas (2003, p.487) is certainly right in suggesting that ‘war tends to fragment geographical space’. While a city lives under the control of the incumbent’s army, a rebel militia controls a town up the hill and the one in the valley lives in the crossfire (Arjona 2014, p.7). In this regard, a civil war scenario is characterised by a competition between the incumbent and one or many rebel groups that try to impose their political and social project. Such scenario is what Charles Tilly theorises as a ‘revolutionary situation’ (Tilly 1978, Ch.7), characterised by the breaking of the previously single government and the consequent descent into a ‘multiple sovereignty’ or ‘multi polity’ situation. And clearly, Tilly is right in asserting that what identifies the onset of such state of affairs is the essential pillar of sovereignty: claim making.

Taking a Foucauldian stance, sovereignty does not lie within any particular location but becomes a dynamic element nourished by truth claims (Rouse 2005). The multiplicity of sovereignty claims highlights the ‘relationship between knowledge, order and authority’ (Williams 200 , p.29) amid the epistemological uncertainty of a civil war scenario. Commonly misunderstood, Hobbes argued that the state of nature following the disruption of the Leviathan is not characterised by the absence of government but by the existence of plural governance. The former assumption, as Mampilly (2007, p.l5) suggests, has ‘limited our understanding of politics in conflict zones (…) and of how rebels govern the territory’.

Moreover, the state-centric tendency within mainstream political science becomes highly problematic when we want to approach the existence of multiple political formations in a context of civil war, essentially if our focus of study is a postcolonial space. When the notion of sovereignty is presented as adjacent to the phenomenon of the modern state, it denies ‘alternative possibilities because it fixes our understanding within statist communities and [conceives] mere contingency outside them’ (Walker 1990, p.14).

Thus, when sovereignty is presented as a ‘security-spatial nexus’, the different political imaginations that can be performed ‘become obscured in favour of an ideal-type territorial state’ (Agnew 1994, pp.63-64). As a result, the conceptual frameworks often used to analyse the existence of multiple political authorities in wartime mimic the ‘state formation template’. Hence, such entities are mainly regarded as ‘parastates’, ‘primitive or protostates’ (Moselle and Polack 2001, p.14), ‘states- within-states’ (Spears 2004), ‘shadow states’ (Reno 2000) or, as Clunan (2010, p.4) denounces, even ‘ungoverned spaces associated with state failure or fragility’ such as tribal Waziristan, clan-based governments in Somalia or the FARC insurgency.

Rather interestingly, the eruption of an alternative political and social order in a frontierland (as the Islamic State itself) complicates the equation even further. Sovereignties, thus, not only appear to be competing but overlapping. As Thorup (2010, p.64) suggests, the state centric logic is ‘tested, challenged, resisted and ignored’ in the frontierland, a space that becomes the ‘memory of the state’s own past but also the primal statist image of disorder’. Thus, alternative political and social orders in the postcolonial world very often disrupt territorial states as the essential loci of identity and establish themselves as transnational entities, both in the material sense and in the realms of culture, identity and symbolism. According to Williams (2010, p.44), borders become particularly relevant when ‘they involve contiguous spaces juxtaposing different forms and levels of governance’ and develop they own character and dynamics.

Font: Der Spiegel

Hence, I believe that the state formation analogy is deeply problematic when addressing political and social entities that are generated outside and in opposition to the incumbent’s authority. The state-centric approach mistakenly tends to identify as anarchical what are political orders outside the umbrella of the state, and when it accounts for the existence of such entities, tends to project them along the path of progressive state formation.

And as Baylouny (2010, p.136) suggests, the Middle East is abundant in areas unregulated by the state; areas in which authority is not ancient, longstanding or doomed to become a state, but exercised by ‘self-made leaders’ that enforce it through governance and legitimacy.

The postcolonial world has indeed experienced many instances of such social spaces: malleable entities that become ruled by non-state actors as a consequence of war. In fact, instead of assuming that war enhances the capacity of states to control societies through their institutions, I would rather highlight the capacity of war to ‘turn the structure and roles of the state into highly contested issues of public debate’ (Heydemann 2000, pp.17-18). War transforms the seemingly solid pillars of the state into transparent objects of enquiry.

Paying more attention to different forms of rebel governance may enhance our knowledge on key concepts of civil war studies such as the fragmentation of national sovereignties, the relationship between rebel rulers and the production of alternative authorities and, of course, the phenomenon of governance in wartime itself. By framing rebel socio-political order outside the nation-state template, we will be able to develop a more nuanced framework in which phenomena such as the Islamic State could be inscribed and understood.

[The Islamic State] is not a disease, it is a symptom. (…) However, there are grounds for optimism. While the strength and appeal of ISIS should not be underestimated, its rise has triggered a unique debate in the region (Hassan 2014).

Many scholars have often dismissed the history of East-West relations. In fact, categorical distinctions, binaries and a strong focus on conflict have characterised much of the Western theoretical corpus on cultural history. This particular Eurocentric view, however, both fails to account for the achievements of the East and distorts Western history (Goody 1996).

Opposed to this framework of analysis, I argue that there is a need to reconsider the West along polycivilisational lines (Hobson 2007a, p.150), hence understanding civilisations as constantly constituted and re-shaped through interactions with others (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006). Thus, I advocate for a more dynamic interpretation of the West’s historical trajectory in order to abandon the Eurocentric tenets and constructions and rethink the Eastern and Islamic legacy within the West’s history.

The Western identity is a rather recent product within the course of world history. Between 1700 and 1850, the formation of a Eurocentric discourse became the essential underpin of the incipient European identity in a post-Christendom era. However, as Amin (1989, p.vii) suggests, ‘Eurocentrism is not a banal ethnocentrism’, a simple narcissist discourse of superiority that, I argue, can be found throughout history in every single collective.

Conversely, the Eurocentric discursive complex is one that assumes that civilisation only rooted in the Occident while the Orient becomes either instrumentalised or ostracised within the Western cosmology (Adib-Moghaddam 2011, p.57). The East in general, and Islam in particular, were given a mere functional value in the Eurocentric narrative in defining what Europe was not.

Thus, there are two characteristics of paramount importance in the re-engineering process (Ibid, p.61) of a ‘self-constituting’ Western consciousness: firstly, that the Eastern and Western civilisations were imagined as two opposed camps divided by a ‘civilisational line of apartheid’ (Hobson 2007a, p.151); and secondly, that Islam was artificially ‘othersied’ and transformed into a cultural entity inherently characterised by its non-rationality, backwardness and despotism.

Font: libreria-mundoarabe.com

The non-Eurocentric scholarly community has certainly grown in the last decades, but historians seem still far from closing the gap between Western history and that of the ‘peripheries’. Because the conceptual tools at their disposal are still feeble, fierce critiques such as the one written by Hobson (2004), albeit detailed and instructive, fail to overcome the binaries or develop a positive explanation.

Thus, I advocate for a historical-dialogical examination of the Western civilisation. My approach draws upon the notion of dialogism put forward by Bakhtin in his literary theory. As he puts it, ‘The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way’ (Bakhtin 1981, p.279). A dialogical approach to history affirms the necessity to acknowledge the plurality of subjectivities within one particular collective, hence pointing at the incapacity for a subject to exist outside the ideas, discourses and history of the others. This approach, thus, aims to mediate between conflicting historical narratives and proposes an interactive deliberation over history in which meanings can only be created dialogically (Kearney 2013).

A Historical-Dialogical account of the Western civilisation

One of the most problematic tenets of Eurocentrism is its interpretation of rationality and economic progress in a binary way: either you have them or not. What follows is that the Western civilisation seems to have such qualities in an exclusive and endogenous way, whereas the East and the Islamic world are seen as hostile to those ideas. What I propose is to challenge this assumption through an interpretation of the East and Islam as co-constitutive of the West’s historical trajectory, hence pointing at their common legacies and experiences.

As Amin (1989, p.10) argues, up until 1500, Western Europe was part of a plural ‘regional tributary system’ that also included the Arab-Muslim peoples of North Africa and the Levant. This cultural system was characterised by the pre-eminence of the ‘metaphisical aspiration’ (Ibid, p.7) of different religions in claiming an absolute truth. However, and contrary to the Eurocentric proposition, Europe was at the periphery of such system, which had its centre in the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

And there were precisely the Muslims, not long after the Prophet’s death (Hobson 2004, p.177), who put forward the notion of the man as a rational agent. As the Eastern Christians did, they were able to reconcile the Hellenic scholasticism with their new faith (Amin 1989, p. 42), giving birth to a synthesis that would have an enormous impact on European modern thinking. Such intellectual position became the nodal point of thinkers such as al-Razi (865-925), al- Farabi (873-950), Ibn Sina (980-1037) or Ibn- Rushd (1126-1198).

Ibn-Rushd was the most influential thinker during the second period (post-Ghazali) of falsafa. He sought the reconciliation of religion and philosophy by delimiting the roles of both, hence pioneering a quasi-secular, individualist construct that, when entered Europe, shook the tectonic plates of the Church (Walker 2005, p.62-63).

Font: Islamiceconomy.net

Embraced by many European thinkers, his ideas provided the substratum that nurtured the rebirth of scholasticism in a Europe that seemed incapable of assimilating Eastern Hellenic philosophical ideas until the 11th century. As Hobson (2004, p.178) highlights, the Muslims also began to embrace the idea of scientific experimentation, which later became the underpinning of the scientific revolution that took place in Europe.

Rather interestingly, the absence of a ‘clash mentality’ in the syntaxes of these various Islamic philosophers (Adib-Moghaddam 2011, p.76) suggests that, beyond the tensions that existed between two religions that equally claimed to bear universal truth, the interrelations between both entities were characterised by a common legacy of rational enquiry, philosophy and science. And in fact, the history of al-Andalus – the East within the West, one could argue – reminds us of how the peoples of the Book co-existed and interacted throughout many centuries in a largely peaceful way (Gutiérrez de Terán 2012).

Beyond questioning the Western rational and scientific exclusiveness, many non- Eurocentric scholars have been pointing at the crucial role that the East and the Arab Islamic world have had in the West’s trajectory towards capitalism and economic development. In fact, one of the crucial arguments put forward by Hobson (2004, p.22) is that the Eastern resource portfolios had been essential to every European turning point between 500 and 1492.

Two points are worth noting at this stage: firstly, that the huge flow of ideas and capital which sprout in the East and later incorporated in the West invalidates the Eurocentric conception of the East and its presupposed lack of agency. On the contrary, by looking at the agency of ‘the other’ we can move from the apparently unbreakable ‘clash mentality’ and engage in a more nuanced analysis by stressing trends of civilizational cross-fertilisation. And secondly, that the mercantilist mentality is not intrinsic to the Western civilisation as the paladins of Eurocentrism might argue.

As Goody (1996, p.82) suggests, the development of a rational system of accounting cannot be exclusively attributed to the growth in mercantile activity in medieval and Renaissance Europe, but rather as developments that already took place in similar economic and trade conditions of across the Eastern Mediterranean and South East Asia.

Furthermore, by acknowledging the essential role of the family in running commerce and private activities in different Eurasian societies (Ibid, p. 192), we can challenge the Eurocentric dichotomy of the ‘primitive’ East as anchored in tribal, despotic relations, and the ‘pristine’ West as rational and individualistic.

The historical-dialogical prism fits coherently, I would argue, in analysing the genealogy of the Western identity. And precisely, is this Bakhtinian notion of dialogism the one that appears encapsulated in the term ‘Oriental West’ (Hobson 2004).

In fact, the ‘Other’ had constituted the ‘Self’ long before the Renaissance and the development of the modern Western identity. Thus, the presence of the Muslim Arabs in Andalusia or Sicily became the catalyser for the Christian prelates to frame Islam as the negation of Christianity (Kabbani 1986, p.5), and also to unite a hitherto fractious ‘Europe’ around the idea of Christendom. The myth of ‘Europe-as-Christendom’ (Hobson 2004, p.112), thus, was the first stage of the European identity formation.

Nonetheless, the modern Western identity has in the European Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment its most important historical underpinning. According to Amin (1989, p.71), the Renaissance gave birth to the two-fold transformation that would shape the modern world: the consolidation of the capitalist society in Europe and its conquest of the world. Key to this modern identity formation is the crystallisation of positivism in the European scientific philosophy during the late Renaissance.

Western powers, thus, began to develop an imperial mind-set (Adib-Moghaddam 2011, p. 117) by affirming their absolute capacity in knowing and possessing the world. The specific historical advantage in terms of science, knowledge and power that the Europeans experienced throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was framed, hence, as historically permanent and almost biologically determined (Goody 1996, p.2).

Font: ppesydney.net

As Balibar (1991, Ch.3) has pointed out in her analysis of Racism and Nationalism in contemporary history, with the development of an ‘Imperialist superiority complex’, the expansionist project turned into an ‘enterprise of universal domination, the founding of a civilisation’.

However, the final stage was much more pervasive. The ‘Other’, which developed institutions, knowledge and wealth that were incorporated into the ‘Self’, became historically removed. Arguably, the West engaged in a paradoxical negation of the ‘Self’. The positivist, racist stance that the West began to embrace was finally wrapped up in the early 19th century through the construction of the ‘Ancient Greece myth’.

This is precisely what Goody (2006) puts forward with his term ‘theft of history’: Western Europe constructed a false idea of the Ancient Greece, which was seen as the birthplace of Western rationality, as the first step of a teleological line of progress that drove the West towards the Renaissance, capitalism and later world dominance. Hellenism is constructed as the antecedent of the European Enlightenment and, thus, segregated from its Eastern Egyptian and Phoenician legacy. The racist, imperialist European identity was, therefore, fully developed throughout the 17th and 18th centuries through the creation of a mythical discontinuity between Europe and the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean (Amin 1989, p.10). As Delanty (1995, p.84) suggests, the construction of the Western European identity found its later stage in the age of Imperialism. Thus, in the encounter with other civilisations, the identity of Europe was shaped through the deliberate dichotomisation of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ as two opposed poles.

But interestingly, civilisations also engaged in dialogical relations under the dialectics of imperialism and resistance. In fact, imperial dominance is constantly co-constituted and re-negotiated through resistance. As Nederveen Pieterse (1990, Ch.15) points out, the civilizational ‘edges’ have to be seen as permeable frontiers within which both civilisations continuously constitute and reshape each other, hence becoming crucial to their own historical trajectories. For instance, it is essential to acknowledge the role and agency of Eastern nationalist movements in securing the decolonisation process in many parts of the world, what subsequently allowed the global expansion of economic relations that were hitherto confined to the limits of the formal empire.

Thus, the Western Eurocentric discourse – underpinned by its teleological, exclusivist and mythical interpretation of European history – keeps on denying the inter- civilisational relations that have been present throughout the last millennium (Hobson 2007b, p.111).

The biggest of all ironies is that, by putting the imperialist mentality forward and denying its eastern legacy, the West has undermined its own ‘Self’.

– Extract from ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: A Historical-Dialogical Approach of the Western Civilisation’. Submitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of London on the 2nd of April 2014 –